Thursday, March 16, 2006

Did anyone say partition?

As one can see from the date on the last posting a long time has passed. I decided that I will change my approach to the composition of this page and rather than spend a lot of time in composing long winded pages, I will write smaller postings in the hope that they will be more frequent.

I will ask two open questions: how about partitioning Iraq? Why hasn’t anyone mentioned it? As everyone knows a lot of the problems of an ethnic nature within modern states are caused by the fact that these states are the products of colonial creations. (To the accusation that Britain is at greater fault than other countries one can simply reply that this is because Britain had more colonies and not because of other more nefarious reasons.) Subsequent events led sometimes to partition (e.g. Pakistan) and sometimes not (e.g. Nigeria): sometimes even to reunification as in Vietnam. One could be justified in wondering why it is so hard to break up something that in the first place was put together is such an artificial way. One reason could be that the people put in charge by the departing power were not necessarily of the most honest nature and therefore a larger country has a large scope for greed. Another is that some people honestly believed in artificial ideals, the same type of people (together with the ones that enjoy the kleptocratic element of it) that put and keep together the artificial creation that Italy is.

The situation in Iraq (one of Britain’s creations) is dire. That the problem lies with the relation between three ethnic groups is evident to anyone and yet no one seems to propose the simplest solution: partition. Technically speaking, and this makes the implementation of it far easier than, say, Bosnia, apart from few spots the three groups are geographically well separated. Moreover, under a more selfish point of view, the people that should be in favour of it (Shiites and Kurds) are in power and have the oil fields in their portion of territory. Why the coalition does not propose it is more understandable. They do not want to be accused of breaking up a country. For some naïve reasons in an age of internationalism and globalisation people favour more unions than partitions. Also, they would be doing to the Sunnis something not very pleasant: not only they took the power away from them, but they would be taking the oil as well: it is hard to judge what the consequences would be, the Arab/Islamic propaganda machine is very powerful.I am still asking the question. How bad do things need to become before anyone else joins me?